Well, we've had our first hilarious language misunderstanding. Shortly after dinner one night Charlie came to me with his dictionary open to the entry "cream." All the way through our China trip, he had been happiest drinking those drinkable yogurt drinks. They're very creamy. So I told him I didn't have any, but would buy some on our next trip to the store.
We went to the store a day or so later. I picked up some strawberry flavored drinkable yogurts for him. He liked them, especially since he has decided he doesn't like milk. He's been happily drinking them. Hey, as long as he's getting some dairy, I don't care if it's milk or yogurt, right?
Last night he came to me with sign dictionary open again. Same word--cream. I figured he was asking to have another one, since I'd only been putting them out at breakfast. I told him they were in the refrigerator and he could have one now, too, if he wanted. He got a startled look on his face, and kept pointing to the word in the sign dictionary. I went to the refrigerator and took one out to show him. He shook his head and pointed to the word again.
Hmmmm.....
Took the dictionary, and looked at the words clustered around that one. They were words like "perfume" and "bath oil."
Poor kid. His skin was dry and he wanted some cream or lotion to rub into his face.
No wonder he was startled. Here, have a strawberry yogurt.
Friday, January 19, 2007
Friday, January 12, 2007
Revenge of the Sherpa
My sherpa, a faithful reader of this blog, will get much satisfaction from this post. I have gotten even with Charlie on her behalf.
Remember how people in China kept trying to feed us things described as "local delicacies" which cause most westerners to lose their appetites instantly? Remember how my sherpa kept turning green and either skipping a meal completely while pushing food around her plate with her chopsticks to politely look like she was eating, or begging at the next table over if it had something more appetizing-looking than ours?
And the whole time this was going on, Charlie was having a grand old time, eating things like dog meat and ostrich kidneys and duck innards of varying sorts, and laughing his head off at the colors our faces turned at the thought of touching what he was wolfing down.
Today was payback time. You're in America now, boy. For lunch I threw some Gorton's fish fillets in the oven and made a pot of macaroni and cheese.
He likes noodles. I don't know what his problem is. But the minute I set that plate down in front of him, he morphed into a picky teenager. Turned up his flat little nose and waved his hand in the Chinese sign for "no." Turned a funny color, too.
Revenge...how sweet it is.
Remember how people in China kept trying to feed us things described as "local delicacies" which cause most westerners to lose their appetites instantly? Remember how my sherpa kept turning green and either skipping a meal completely while pushing food around her plate with her chopsticks to politely look like she was eating, or begging at the next table over if it had something more appetizing-looking than ours?
And the whole time this was going on, Charlie was having a grand old time, eating things like dog meat and ostrich kidneys and duck innards of varying sorts, and laughing his head off at the colors our faces turned at the thought of touching what he was wolfing down.
Today was payback time. You're in America now, boy. For lunch I threw some Gorton's fish fillets in the oven and made a pot of macaroni and cheese.
He likes noodles. I don't know what his problem is. But the minute I set that plate down in front of him, he morphed into a picky teenager. Turned up his flat little nose and waved his hand in the Chinese sign for "no." Turned a funny color, too.
Revenge...how sweet it is.
We're baaaack.....
Okay, today is 1/12/07 (I think) and we got in yesterday morning (our time) which was the day before yesterday (their time) and.....oh, good grief. We're just back.
I've still got to blog the Beijing portion. I will try to get that done in the next day or so. But once that's done, it will officially bring to a close our adoption journey.
Now that we're back, I won't be blogging as often, but I promise to put up an occasional update, especially since things are already pretty hilarious at times. Yes, we're having some frustrations, but on the whole things are going pretty well. So, check back once in a while and see what's new at the funny farm.
Now begins the journey of becoming a family.
I've still got to blog the Beijing portion. I will try to get that done in the next day or so. But once that's done, it will officially bring to a close our adoption journey.
Now that we're back, I won't be blogging as often, but I promise to put up an occasional update, especially since things are already pretty hilarious at times. Yes, we're having some frustrations, but on the whole things are going pretty well. So, check back once in a while and see what's new at the funny farm.
Now begins the journey of becoming a family.
Wednesday, January 10, 2007
Beijing
We arrived late because our plane had been delayed due to ice in Beijing. They had apparently had a nasty snowstorm a couple of days prior to our arrival and were still recovering the runways. We saw a little bit of snow laying around still, but not much. After running around without coats in Guangzhou for nearly a week, it was a shock to walk into the Beijing cold.
Our guide, Tony, got us checked in at the hotel, and we arranged a time to meet in the morning. He's a very snappy dresser. Jen at one point commented that Tony was better dressed than most women she knew. He showed up most days in pinstripe slacks with a business shirt and sunglasses, very metro-ish.
We headed up to our rooms. For Beijing, I had arranged for two 2-person rooms, since Rick would be with us, and I figured we’d put Rick and Charlie in one and Jen and me in the other. Rick was already checked in and on the way to being asleep.
But Charlie didn’t know any of this. We had kept it a secret that Rick would be joining us. We walked into our room, and there were only two beds, of course. Charlie turned and looked at me with an “oh, no, not again….” look on his face, remembering the scene in Guangzhou when we were given a room the size of a small closet without a third bed or even a rollaway. So I crooked a finger at him to say “come here” and headed out into the hallway. I knocked on the door next to ours, and while waiting for Rick to open it, I told Charlie that I had a big surprise for him; since there were only two beds in my room, he was going to sleep in this room—with Rick. He got a very confused look on his face, as if to say no, no, I couldn’t have understood this right; then he looked up at me and signed, “Rick? Here???” When I grinned and nodded just as the door opened, Charlie’s face just split in half in the biggest grin I have seen from him yet. He truly just lit up.
Rick had a nasty cold. We could hear him all night coughing from our room. Thank goodness Charlie is deaf.
The next day we started out bright and early for the Sacred Path of the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall. We stopped and picked up Hans, our Chinese sign language interpreter, from the subway station. He was a really sweet postgrad student at Beijing University who volunteers in their sign language association. I don’t think anyone in China actually works as an interpreter for the deaf—it sounds like they’re all just volunteers. Before we arrived in Beijing, I had given thought to actually canceling the interpreter because Charlie was doing so well in sign, but it was too late to cancel by that point, so we let it stand and Tony said we’d see how it worked out the first day or so. I’m glad we stuck with it, after all. He definitely added a new dimension to the trip, and Charlie really enjoyed being with someone who was fluent in Chinese sign. Hans did confirm that Charlie said he was picking up about half of what Rick signed and something more than half of what I signed but was not always letting on if he didn’t get it. So we started to get suspicious about every nod of the head, wondering if he really was getting it. But the signs started coming back to us more and more all the time, so I think he understands quite a bit, just not getting every single word but still getting the ideas.
We got some neat photos on the Sacred Path. We only got a couple of the statues in our photos, but if you want to see some really great shots, go to http://www.micktravels.com/china/sacredway.html and check out theirs. It was awesome! Then we went to a smoky little restaurant on the way to the Great Wall. Our guide here in Beijing, Tony, got a pretty quick understanding of our likes and dislikes, and most of the things he ordered were considered edible even by the Sherpa. Good thing, ‘cause we wanted to do some Great Wall climbing, and Jen was gonna need some calories for energy on that.
I was afraid that it would be just a walk in the park, since we were planning to take a cable car up and the sled down (since the cable car and sled were doing all the work, what more was there???). Not to worry. We got a workout, and we had the added excitement of almost getting killed, too.
Tony found out that we couldn’t take the cable car up if we wanted to sled down, because the cable car went to a tower in a completely different area a long way from the entrance to the sled/toboggan thingie. If you want to toboggan down, you have to take a ski lift up. Sherpa started whining. Claimed I had promised her an enclosed cable car (I never once used the word enclosed!) and that we would fall off this open ski-lift-chair-on-a-wire thing and be killed. I shushed the Sherpa, and up we went. It was c-c-c-cold going up on that thing! She got some footage with the videocam, but I think she had trouble turning it off because her fingers just froze to it. Just when we thought we were at the end, the crest of the mountain was coming up, it went through a junction pole and started up even further. The view was absolutely spectacular, by the way. Once we all got up to the very top, two by two, we realized this wasn’t gonna be a walk in the park. We were in one of the guard towers on the Wall, and the real work wasn’t in getting here, it was in getting from one tower to another. See the pictures on the photo section of the blog—it was really cool. In between each tower, there would be a combination of steps and steep ramps. The steps were not of uniform height, as they were all hand-made, so you really had to watch where you were going or you’d fall. Tony explained that the Wall was not just for guarding against invasion—it was a communications device. The dip in between towers was so that a clear line of sight from tower to tower could be maintained no matter what was going on at the top of the wall itself. If an impending invasion were sighted, the guards in each tower would light a torch made of wolf scat (wolf pu-PU, as Tony put it) and hold it up to signal the guards at the next tower. Each tower would then light the torch until the message got all the way to Beijing to the Emperor to warn of an invasion.
The Wall was just awesome. We climbed up to the roof of one of the towers for a survey. Rick was just standing there with his jaw dropped, and I swear he had tears glistening in his eyes (maybe it was just the cold, biting wind?) when he thanked me for inviting him along on this part of the trip.
Jen and Tony hung back after walking just one tower—Jen’s knee had been giving her trouble, and Tony has done this guide thing a million times, so he is no longer impressed. Rick, Charlie, Hans, and I walked about 4-5 towers. We wanted to go all the way to the top, but we ran out of steam and Rick’s coughing was getting really bad, so we headed back. When we came to the entrance to the toboggans, the Sherpa started whining again. She didn’t like the looks of them. Can’t we pleeeeeeeze just take the scary chair thingie back down again? Nope, the guide has already paid for the toboggan tickets, not the chair lift tickets. She’d have to climb down there to change her tickets. Rick led off and was out of sight in an instant. I thought I heard a faint “yahoo” about 5 minutes later, but I’m not sure, he was gone that fast. Then Charlie went. Charlie didn’t quite get the hang of the balance to get the thing going well, so he was going very slowly, not fully releasing the brakes. Hans went behind him and kind of pushed him along as best he could. Then Jen took off. I was behind her, and Tony brought up the rear. I waited a good while before heading off, since I knew they were all crawling behind Charlie, but I still caught up with them rather quickly, and Tony a minute later, and we all crawled down the mountain.
That’s when we nearly got killed. Despite signs every 100 meters telling people to beware of blind curves and to stay within a speed limit, an American idiot and his 4-year-old idiot apprentice come barreling down the mountain on a 2-person toboggan and never slowed down coming around the blind curve. They slammed into Tony’s toboggan, pushing the nose up. Tony was at least moving when they hit, so the impact on him wasn’t that great.
I, however, made a very bad decision in that split-second after hearing it coming. I stopped, figuring that it would end with my toboggan instead of causing a chain reaction all the way down through Jen, Hans, and Charlie. Bad move. Tony’s toboggan hit me square in the shoulders and flipped me up in the air, and I came back down hitting my tailbone on my toboggan, which folded in half and flew up, hitting Jen in the small of her back.
Jen was pretty bruised up. I couldn’t move at all for a minute, and when I could, all I could do was roll myself over the edge of the metal tubing the toboggans were in and drop off the side into the snow—I was afraid another speeding jerk might be behind the first one.
The guy never even apologized or asked if we were hurt. He just had a rather annoyed look on his face that were were still in the way and he had to wait until we took off again. Eventually I found my feet again, and got back on the toboggan and we made our slow, painful way down the rest of the mountain. As we were exiting the toboggans, we heard the staff who help you out of them and then remove them from the track yelling and screaming. Guess who they were yelling at? Jerk-O hadn’t even slowed down at the end, just came in full speed. Man, I feel sorry for his kid, growing up with an example like that.
All the remainder of that day and the next, I thought I had done serious damage to the sciatic nerve because I had severe shooting pains down the left back and leg when I tried to walk or even turn over in bed. But on the third day it started getting better, and I figure it must have just bruised the nerve really bad. It sure bruised me—I had huge bruises on my tailbone and down the backs of my legs, and it felt like there was a bruise between my shoulder blades, although it didn’t show one.
Of course, it didn’t take the Sherpa long to start in with the “I told you so” routine. I knew I’d never hear the end of this one.
After dinner, we went to see the Shaolin Monks do a Kung Fu exhibition. Jen described it well when she called it more of a ballet with Kung Fu moves. It was a story about a little boy’s journey to become a monk and master his Kung Fu. At one point, he fell from grace due to an illusion of a woman (why do they always blame women?) and the subtitles in English above the stage said his Kung Fu was damaged. That’s when Sherpa leans over and hisses, “That’s what wrong with us—our Kung Fu was damaged!” Got some dirty looks trying not to choke in a quiet theatre.
The next day, we went to the Confucius Temple and Lama Temple. The Confucius was inactive and under heavy renovation, but interesting anyway. Lama Temple was an active Buddhist Temple with monks all over the place and people burning incense and praying. It was fascinating, but the incense smell was overpowering, since they don’t just burn a stick at a time, each person burns an entire bundle. The Buddha statue in the main building was 26 meters high. (Think 3 stories high.)
The highlight of the day was the ice skating. I definitely had to sit this one out because I was still in extreme pain from being attacked by a toboggan the day before, and since I was just going to sit on the sidelines anyway, Jen (who was originally planning to sit on sidelines and take pictures of me falling on my keester) decided to stay at the hotel and try the internet connections again and let me do my own picture-taking for a change.
Charlie learned pretty quickly. I’d like to say he was doing triple lutzes and spins by the end of the session, but I’ll settle for the fact that he wasn’t wiping out too many times and no bones were broken. It was heart-warming to see Rick playing the role of big brother, helping teach Charlie to skate, holding his hand until he felt more sure of himself, helping him up when he wiped out. He was positively tender with him, and though I wouldn’t admit it to him, it made me cry. He’s wanted a brother for so long.
Back at the hotel, I was trying to wrap presents and asked Charlie for the tape. He signed that it was broken. Whaddaya mean, broken? How do you break Scotch tape, for cryin’ out loud? He brought it to me, and showed me the plastic container had snapped in half, no doubt the victim of rough luggage handling by the airlines. Then Charlie got a glint in his eye. I have already come to recognize that “I have an idea” look. A few minutes later, Charlie came back, having fixed the tape dispenser—he had seen Rick’s roll of duct tape in his luggage, and had duct taped the whole thing back together. (See picture in Beijing album.) Rick all of a sudden started chortling with glee, and yelling, “Now he’s REALLY my brother!!!” Rick fixes everything he breaks with duct tape, including his car. He has a Saturn. They don’t just dent, since they’re not made of metal, so when he had his first accident, he ended up with some holes in it, which he covered over with duct tape. He then got a bumper magnet that says “Silence is golden, but duct tape is SILVER” and since it wouldn’t stick (again, Saturns are not metal), he duct taped the magnet to the bumper. Rick and Charlie are now truly brothers, but the bond is not blood—it’s duct tape.
The next day we went to the Summer Palace. I think this was my favorite place on the Beijing part of the trip. It is easy to imagine being the empress and wandering through the outdoor arches and pine-arbored walkways. So ornate, very beautiful. I got some pictures, but they don’t really do it justice.
We did a “drive-by” (that’s what our itinerary called it) of the two stadiums that will hold the 2008 Olympics. Again, see the pictures. One is called the Bird’s Nest, and the other is called the Bubble Box. Two very interesting-looking edifices. Olympic village is still under construction, building huge buildings that will house all the athletes and all the workers it will take to put this gig on.
The Olympics is a big deal, and souvenirs are already on sale. At every major site, not just around the Olympics arenas area, vendors have Olympic babies for sale in some form or other, and they come after you shouting “Are you a baby?” Tony finally clued me in—the Chinese word for Olympic sounds like “are you a,” so they’re running after us asking “Olympic baby? Olympic baby?”
That is one thing I won’t miss. It is impossible to window shop in China without being accosted by someone trying to sell something. Vendors will bump into you deliberately on the street, strike up a conversation and beg and plead with you to come visit their shops. At places like the Great Wall, you literally get mobbed by vendors hawking their wares. They smell money the second they see our round eyes. And if you get a good deal, it’s “just for you.”
One great example: As we left the Summer Palace, an old lady started in on Rick. She had a dark red dragon in a box. Rick is a dragon collector, and he really wanted a dragon from China, anyway, so he asked her how much. She told him 126 (yuan). Having been warned that you should never pay what they ask for, he bargained her down to 70, and was feeling mighty proud of himself—until, having given her the money and taken possession of his dragon and turned to leave, another old lady starts chasing after him, yelling, “Just for you—30 yuan!” He turned to look, and this old lady was holding out the same EXACT dragon he had just paid 70 yuan for, and the first old lady was sitting back and grinning.
Just to rub it in, I bargain the second old lady down to 20 yuan, and bought her dragon myself. Gave it to him later so he could have a pair of bookends. Good reminder. He hates me.
In the afternoon, we visited a Hutong, which is an ancient neighborhood. Talk about a sense of community—you ride through by pedicab, and the first thing the Hutong guide does is take you to the public lavatories. Trust me, you just don’t wanna go there. Literally. Especially when it’s cold enough out to freeze your @$$ off. We had a nice visit with a local family who are considered wealthy by Hutong standards, since they are the only family in the neighborhood to have their own bathroom and shower. Their “house” was 3 rooms. It was worth $500,000 US dollars. Really! They heat with coal florets, one stove in the whole joint. Their kitchen has a propane bottle stove that they have to buy a new propane bottle for once a month. All what we here would consider rather primitive living conditions, but they have some beautiful and very valuable furniture. They are retired, so they are not allowed to drive. In China, they limit the age at which you can drive, and the elderly must get around by bicycle.
A tour like that certainly gives you cause to reflect on our level of creature comfort.
We then climbed the Bell Tower and had a tea pouring ceremony in the teahouse in the base of the tower. At one point, while we were shopping around in there, Tony asked Jen to put on his sunglasses. She thought maybe there was some optical illusion or something he was trying to get her to see, so she put them on and then looked up, and down, and sideways. Nothing. So she looked at Tony and asked why she was wearing his sunglasses. He replied because she looked so beautiful and mysterious, he just had to see how she looked in them. She took them off, trying hard not to laugh. When she mentioned it later that night, she was astounded that he would be making a pass at her. I don’t see why she should be so shocked, because she is really beautiful, inside and out. But it was funny to see Tony acting like a schoolboy over her. (Reminder: married woman, 3 kids….)
The next day we went to Tiananmen Square. Jen stayed behind, since she’d been there and done that already and wanted some computer time. Tony was distraught.
While at Tiananmen, we visited the Great Hall of the People. Rick did not realize this was considered a government building, not just a tourist hotspot, which was unfortunate, because they had a security check at the front door. For those of you who do not know what I mean when I say it was deja vu all over again, please go to the archive on the left of your screen, and find an older entry from early 2006 titled "What NOT to take to a federal building."
That evening we went to a Hotpot dinner. Can’t even begin to describe it, you’d have to see the picture to get an idea. Tony had done pretty good at that point, choosing meals that Jen could eat, but this one blew his winning streak. Jen just did her pushing food around game throughout the meal and drank a lot of beer.
I actually enjoyed the hotpot meal, but I drank a bit of the beer anyway since the food was so spicy. After we left the restaurant, we hiked to the subway station to head for the evening’s entertainment, and since it was so cold, Jen and I were arm-in-arm, cutting up like high-schoolers, just giggling and having fun. Okay, maybe a little tiny bit buzzed. But we were harmless.
That night we saw the Peking Acrobats. Awesome. Those kids simply have no bones in their bodies. Bodies are not meant to bend that way.
The next day was our flight home. We had a morning free of sight-seeing, so we slept in for a change and had a leisurely brunch before packing and checking out. Headed out to the airport at 2 p.m. Jen was a little worried that Tony would try to plant one on her and she’d be forced to smack him, but he behaved himself and settled for a quick hug when we said goodbye.
We saw Rick off on his flight, then settled in for a long wait until our flight was up. The flight back was fairly smooth, and Charlie slept through most of it. We had sent a note to the Captain asking if Charlie could visit the cockpit after we landed, and he sent word back agreeing. But what that meant, since Jen had such a tight connection, is that Charlie and I stayed behind on the plane while she literally ran to catch her next flight, so we never really had time for the emotional good-bye that we were both dreading.
The cockpit was nice. The pilot actually let Charlie sit in his seat and man the plane, which was cool. I showed Charlie the “steering wheel” and showed him that if you pulled it the nose of the plane would go up, if you push it the nose would go down. He just nodded sagely and then showed me the altimeter display and showed how the plane would tilt from side to side. Okay, I give up. How an orphanage kid knows some of the stuff he knows is beyond me. I’m beginning to think he has some other life experiences. Either that or they lied to me about his origins.
I miss Jen. It is uncanny how two total strangers can turn out to be so compatible. After we’d been together for a week, I asked her which of my habits drove her totally bats (because I was thinking it was so funny that she didn’t have any traits that drove me bats), and she laughed, because she had just been thinking the same thing in reverse. It’s so neat to spend time with someone who sees things through pretty much the same eyes you do, has the same sense of humor you do, and thinks the same thoughts you do and can finish your sentences in the same breath. We turned out to have so much in common it was uncanny.
It was amazing that this trip went so well, considering all that could have gone wrong. There were hold-ups here and there: The leaky plane toilet that almost kept me from getting to China, the camera going missing after adoption day, being attacked by one of my own countrymen on a wheeled device, but none of it was insurmountable, and we always managed to find that the blessings outweighed the problems.
Now if they’d only find Jen’s suitcase….it figures, they lost it on the last leg of the trip, between LA and Denver.
If you smell something burning, look at the Sherpa. She’s breathing fire…
Our guide, Tony, got us checked in at the hotel, and we arranged a time to meet in the morning. He's a very snappy dresser. Jen at one point commented that Tony was better dressed than most women she knew. He showed up most days in pinstripe slacks with a business shirt and sunglasses, very metro-ish.
We headed up to our rooms. For Beijing, I had arranged for two 2-person rooms, since Rick would be with us, and I figured we’d put Rick and Charlie in one and Jen and me in the other. Rick was already checked in and on the way to being asleep.
But Charlie didn’t know any of this. We had kept it a secret that Rick would be joining us. We walked into our room, and there were only two beds, of course. Charlie turned and looked at me with an “oh, no, not again….” look on his face, remembering the scene in Guangzhou when we were given a room the size of a small closet without a third bed or even a rollaway. So I crooked a finger at him to say “come here” and headed out into the hallway. I knocked on the door next to ours, and while waiting for Rick to open it, I told Charlie that I had a big surprise for him; since there were only two beds in my room, he was going to sleep in this room—with Rick. He got a very confused look on his face, as if to say no, no, I couldn’t have understood this right; then he looked up at me and signed, “Rick? Here???” When I grinned and nodded just as the door opened, Charlie’s face just split in half in the biggest grin I have seen from him yet. He truly just lit up.
Rick had a nasty cold. We could hear him all night coughing from our room. Thank goodness Charlie is deaf.
The next day we started out bright and early for the Sacred Path of the Ming Tombs and the Great Wall. We stopped and picked up Hans, our Chinese sign language interpreter, from the subway station. He was a really sweet postgrad student at Beijing University who volunteers in their sign language association. I don’t think anyone in China actually works as an interpreter for the deaf—it sounds like they’re all just volunteers. Before we arrived in Beijing, I had given thought to actually canceling the interpreter because Charlie was doing so well in sign, but it was too late to cancel by that point, so we let it stand and Tony said we’d see how it worked out the first day or so. I’m glad we stuck with it, after all. He definitely added a new dimension to the trip, and Charlie really enjoyed being with someone who was fluent in Chinese sign. Hans did confirm that Charlie said he was picking up about half of what Rick signed and something more than half of what I signed but was not always letting on if he didn’t get it. So we started to get suspicious about every nod of the head, wondering if he really was getting it. But the signs started coming back to us more and more all the time, so I think he understands quite a bit, just not getting every single word but still getting the ideas.
We got some neat photos on the Sacred Path. We only got a couple of the statues in our photos, but if you want to see some really great shots, go to http://www.micktravels.com/china/sacredway.html and check out theirs. It was awesome! Then we went to a smoky little restaurant on the way to the Great Wall. Our guide here in Beijing, Tony, got a pretty quick understanding of our likes and dislikes, and most of the things he ordered were considered edible even by the Sherpa. Good thing, ‘cause we wanted to do some Great Wall climbing, and Jen was gonna need some calories for energy on that.
I was afraid that it would be just a walk in the park, since we were planning to take a cable car up and the sled down (since the cable car and sled were doing all the work, what more was there???). Not to worry. We got a workout, and we had the added excitement of almost getting killed, too.
Tony found out that we couldn’t take the cable car up if we wanted to sled down, because the cable car went to a tower in a completely different area a long way from the entrance to the sled/toboggan thingie. If you want to toboggan down, you have to take a ski lift up. Sherpa started whining. Claimed I had promised her an enclosed cable car (I never once used the word enclosed!) and that we would fall off this open ski-lift-chair-on-a-wire thing and be killed. I shushed the Sherpa, and up we went. It was c-c-c-cold going up on that thing! She got some footage with the videocam, but I think she had trouble turning it off because her fingers just froze to it. Just when we thought we were at the end, the crest of the mountain was coming up, it went through a junction pole and started up even further. The view was absolutely spectacular, by the way. Once we all got up to the very top, two by two, we realized this wasn’t gonna be a walk in the park. We were in one of the guard towers on the Wall, and the real work wasn’t in getting here, it was in getting from one tower to another. See the pictures on the photo section of the blog—it was really cool. In between each tower, there would be a combination of steps and steep ramps. The steps were not of uniform height, as they were all hand-made, so you really had to watch where you were going or you’d fall. Tony explained that the Wall was not just for guarding against invasion—it was a communications device. The dip in between towers was so that a clear line of sight from tower to tower could be maintained no matter what was going on at the top of the wall itself. If an impending invasion were sighted, the guards in each tower would light a torch made of wolf scat (wolf pu-PU, as Tony put it) and hold it up to signal the guards at the next tower. Each tower would then light the torch until the message got all the way to Beijing to the Emperor to warn of an invasion.
The Wall was just awesome. We climbed up to the roof of one of the towers for a survey. Rick was just standing there with his jaw dropped, and I swear he had tears glistening in his eyes (maybe it was just the cold, biting wind?) when he thanked me for inviting him along on this part of the trip.
Jen and Tony hung back after walking just one tower—Jen’s knee had been giving her trouble, and Tony has done this guide thing a million times, so he is no longer impressed. Rick, Charlie, Hans, and I walked about 4-5 towers. We wanted to go all the way to the top, but we ran out of steam and Rick’s coughing was getting really bad, so we headed back. When we came to the entrance to the toboggans, the Sherpa started whining again. She didn’t like the looks of them. Can’t we pleeeeeeeze just take the scary chair thingie back down again? Nope, the guide has already paid for the toboggan tickets, not the chair lift tickets. She’d have to climb down there to change her tickets. Rick led off and was out of sight in an instant. I thought I heard a faint “yahoo” about 5 minutes later, but I’m not sure, he was gone that fast. Then Charlie went. Charlie didn’t quite get the hang of the balance to get the thing going well, so he was going very slowly, not fully releasing the brakes. Hans went behind him and kind of pushed him along as best he could. Then Jen took off. I was behind her, and Tony brought up the rear. I waited a good while before heading off, since I knew they were all crawling behind Charlie, but I still caught up with them rather quickly, and Tony a minute later, and we all crawled down the mountain.
That’s when we nearly got killed. Despite signs every 100 meters telling people to beware of blind curves and to stay within a speed limit, an American idiot and his 4-year-old idiot apprentice come barreling down the mountain on a 2-person toboggan and never slowed down coming around the blind curve. They slammed into Tony’s toboggan, pushing the nose up. Tony was at least moving when they hit, so the impact on him wasn’t that great.
I, however, made a very bad decision in that split-second after hearing it coming. I stopped, figuring that it would end with my toboggan instead of causing a chain reaction all the way down through Jen, Hans, and Charlie. Bad move. Tony’s toboggan hit me square in the shoulders and flipped me up in the air, and I came back down hitting my tailbone on my toboggan, which folded in half and flew up, hitting Jen in the small of her back.
Jen was pretty bruised up. I couldn’t move at all for a minute, and when I could, all I could do was roll myself over the edge of the metal tubing the toboggans were in and drop off the side into the snow—I was afraid another speeding jerk might be behind the first one.
The guy never even apologized or asked if we were hurt. He just had a rather annoyed look on his face that were were still in the way and he had to wait until we took off again. Eventually I found my feet again, and got back on the toboggan and we made our slow, painful way down the rest of the mountain. As we were exiting the toboggans, we heard the staff who help you out of them and then remove them from the track yelling and screaming. Guess who they were yelling at? Jerk-O hadn’t even slowed down at the end, just came in full speed. Man, I feel sorry for his kid, growing up with an example like that.
All the remainder of that day and the next, I thought I had done serious damage to the sciatic nerve because I had severe shooting pains down the left back and leg when I tried to walk or even turn over in bed. But on the third day it started getting better, and I figure it must have just bruised the nerve really bad. It sure bruised me—I had huge bruises on my tailbone and down the backs of my legs, and it felt like there was a bruise between my shoulder blades, although it didn’t show one.
Of course, it didn’t take the Sherpa long to start in with the “I told you so” routine. I knew I’d never hear the end of this one.
After dinner, we went to see the Shaolin Monks do a Kung Fu exhibition. Jen described it well when she called it more of a ballet with Kung Fu moves. It was a story about a little boy’s journey to become a monk and master his Kung Fu. At one point, he fell from grace due to an illusion of a woman (why do they always blame women?) and the subtitles in English above the stage said his Kung Fu was damaged. That’s when Sherpa leans over and hisses, “That’s what wrong with us—our Kung Fu was damaged!” Got some dirty looks trying not to choke in a quiet theatre.
The next day, we went to the Confucius Temple and Lama Temple. The Confucius was inactive and under heavy renovation, but interesting anyway. Lama Temple was an active Buddhist Temple with monks all over the place and people burning incense and praying. It was fascinating, but the incense smell was overpowering, since they don’t just burn a stick at a time, each person burns an entire bundle. The Buddha statue in the main building was 26 meters high. (Think 3 stories high.)
The highlight of the day was the ice skating. I definitely had to sit this one out because I was still in extreme pain from being attacked by a toboggan the day before, and since I was just going to sit on the sidelines anyway, Jen (who was originally planning to sit on sidelines and take pictures of me falling on my keester) decided to stay at the hotel and try the internet connections again and let me do my own picture-taking for a change.
Charlie learned pretty quickly. I’d like to say he was doing triple lutzes and spins by the end of the session, but I’ll settle for the fact that he wasn’t wiping out too many times and no bones were broken. It was heart-warming to see Rick playing the role of big brother, helping teach Charlie to skate, holding his hand until he felt more sure of himself, helping him up when he wiped out. He was positively tender with him, and though I wouldn’t admit it to him, it made me cry. He’s wanted a brother for so long.
Back at the hotel, I was trying to wrap presents and asked Charlie for the tape. He signed that it was broken. Whaddaya mean, broken? How do you break Scotch tape, for cryin’ out loud? He brought it to me, and showed me the plastic container had snapped in half, no doubt the victim of rough luggage handling by the airlines. Then Charlie got a glint in his eye. I have already come to recognize that “I have an idea” look. A few minutes later, Charlie came back, having fixed the tape dispenser—he had seen Rick’s roll of duct tape in his luggage, and had duct taped the whole thing back together. (See picture in Beijing album.) Rick all of a sudden started chortling with glee, and yelling, “Now he’s REALLY my brother!!!” Rick fixes everything he breaks with duct tape, including his car. He has a Saturn. They don’t just dent, since they’re not made of metal, so when he had his first accident, he ended up with some holes in it, which he covered over with duct tape. He then got a bumper magnet that says “Silence is golden, but duct tape is SILVER” and since it wouldn’t stick (again, Saturns are not metal), he duct taped the magnet to the bumper. Rick and Charlie are now truly brothers, but the bond is not blood—it’s duct tape.
The next day we went to the Summer Palace. I think this was my favorite place on the Beijing part of the trip. It is easy to imagine being the empress and wandering through the outdoor arches and pine-arbored walkways. So ornate, very beautiful. I got some pictures, but they don’t really do it justice.
We did a “drive-by” (that’s what our itinerary called it) of the two stadiums that will hold the 2008 Olympics. Again, see the pictures. One is called the Bird’s Nest, and the other is called the Bubble Box. Two very interesting-looking edifices. Olympic village is still under construction, building huge buildings that will house all the athletes and all the workers it will take to put this gig on.
The Olympics is a big deal, and souvenirs are already on sale. At every major site, not just around the Olympics arenas area, vendors have Olympic babies for sale in some form or other, and they come after you shouting “Are you a baby?” Tony finally clued me in—the Chinese word for Olympic sounds like “are you a,” so they’re running after us asking “Olympic baby? Olympic baby?”
That is one thing I won’t miss. It is impossible to window shop in China without being accosted by someone trying to sell something. Vendors will bump into you deliberately on the street, strike up a conversation and beg and plead with you to come visit their shops. At places like the Great Wall, you literally get mobbed by vendors hawking their wares. They smell money the second they see our round eyes. And if you get a good deal, it’s “just for you.”
One great example: As we left the Summer Palace, an old lady started in on Rick. She had a dark red dragon in a box. Rick is a dragon collector, and he really wanted a dragon from China, anyway, so he asked her how much. She told him 126 (yuan). Having been warned that you should never pay what they ask for, he bargained her down to 70, and was feeling mighty proud of himself—until, having given her the money and taken possession of his dragon and turned to leave, another old lady starts chasing after him, yelling, “Just for you—30 yuan!” He turned to look, and this old lady was holding out the same EXACT dragon he had just paid 70 yuan for, and the first old lady was sitting back and grinning.
Just to rub it in, I bargain the second old lady down to 20 yuan, and bought her dragon myself. Gave it to him later so he could have a pair of bookends. Good reminder. He hates me.
In the afternoon, we visited a Hutong, which is an ancient neighborhood. Talk about a sense of community—you ride through by pedicab, and the first thing the Hutong guide does is take you to the public lavatories. Trust me, you just don’t wanna go there. Literally. Especially when it’s cold enough out to freeze your @$$ off. We had a nice visit with a local family who are considered wealthy by Hutong standards, since they are the only family in the neighborhood to have their own bathroom and shower. Their “house” was 3 rooms. It was worth $500,000 US dollars. Really! They heat with coal florets, one stove in the whole joint. Their kitchen has a propane bottle stove that they have to buy a new propane bottle for once a month. All what we here would consider rather primitive living conditions, but they have some beautiful and very valuable furniture. They are retired, so they are not allowed to drive. In China, they limit the age at which you can drive, and the elderly must get around by bicycle.
A tour like that certainly gives you cause to reflect on our level of creature comfort.
We then climbed the Bell Tower and had a tea pouring ceremony in the teahouse in the base of the tower. At one point, while we were shopping around in there, Tony asked Jen to put on his sunglasses. She thought maybe there was some optical illusion or something he was trying to get her to see, so she put them on and then looked up, and down, and sideways. Nothing. So she looked at Tony and asked why she was wearing his sunglasses. He replied because she looked so beautiful and mysterious, he just had to see how she looked in them. She took them off, trying hard not to laugh. When she mentioned it later that night, she was astounded that he would be making a pass at her. I don’t see why she should be so shocked, because she is really beautiful, inside and out. But it was funny to see Tony acting like a schoolboy over her. (Reminder: married woman, 3 kids….)
The next day we went to Tiananmen Square. Jen stayed behind, since she’d been there and done that already and wanted some computer time. Tony was distraught.
While at Tiananmen, we visited the Great Hall of the People. Rick did not realize this was considered a government building, not just a tourist hotspot, which was unfortunate, because they had a security check at the front door. For those of you who do not know what I mean when I say it was deja vu all over again, please go to the archive on the left of your screen, and find an older entry from early 2006 titled "What NOT to take to a federal building."
That evening we went to a Hotpot dinner. Can’t even begin to describe it, you’d have to see the picture to get an idea. Tony had done pretty good at that point, choosing meals that Jen could eat, but this one blew his winning streak. Jen just did her pushing food around game throughout the meal and drank a lot of beer.
I actually enjoyed the hotpot meal, but I drank a bit of the beer anyway since the food was so spicy. After we left the restaurant, we hiked to the subway station to head for the evening’s entertainment, and since it was so cold, Jen and I were arm-in-arm, cutting up like high-schoolers, just giggling and having fun. Okay, maybe a little tiny bit buzzed. But we were harmless.
That night we saw the Peking Acrobats. Awesome. Those kids simply have no bones in their bodies. Bodies are not meant to bend that way.
The next day was our flight home. We had a morning free of sight-seeing, so we slept in for a change and had a leisurely brunch before packing and checking out. Headed out to the airport at 2 p.m. Jen was a little worried that Tony would try to plant one on her and she’d be forced to smack him, but he behaved himself and settled for a quick hug when we said goodbye.
We saw Rick off on his flight, then settled in for a long wait until our flight was up. The flight back was fairly smooth, and Charlie slept through most of it. We had sent a note to the Captain asking if Charlie could visit the cockpit after we landed, and he sent word back agreeing. But what that meant, since Jen had such a tight connection, is that Charlie and I stayed behind on the plane while she literally ran to catch her next flight, so we never really had time for the emotional good-bye that we were both dreading.
The cockpit was nice. The pilot actually let Charlie sit in his seat and man the plane, which was cool. I showed Charlie the “steering wheel” and showed him that if you pulled it the nose of the plane would go up, if you push it the nose would go down. He just nodded sagely and then showed me the altimeter display and showed how the plane would tilt from side to side. Okay, I give up. How an orphanage kid knows some of the stuff he knows is beyond me. I’m beginning to think he has some other life experiences. Either that or they lied to me about his origins.
I miss Jen. It is uncanny how two total strangers can turn out to be so compatible. After we’d been together for a week, I asked her which of my habits drove her totally bats (because I was thinking it was so funny that she didn’t have any traits that drove me bats), and she laughed, because she had just been thinking the same thing in reverse. It’s so neat to spend time with someone who sees things through pretty much the same eyes you do, has the same sense of humor you do, and thinks the same thoughts you do and can finish your sentences in the same breath. We turned out to have so much in common it was uncanny.
It was amazing that this trip went so well, considering all that could have gone wrong. There were hold-ups here and there: The leaky plane toilet that almost kept me from getting to China, the camera going missing after adoption day, being attacked by one of my own countrymen on a wheeled device, but none of it was insurmountable, and we always managed to find that the blessings outweighed the problems.
Now if they’d only find Jen’s suitcase….it figures, they lost it on the last leg of the trip, between LA and Denver.
If you smell something burning, look at the Sherpa. She’s breathing fire…
Saturday, January 6, 2007
Guangzhou
The next several days in Guangzhou were fun, but I’m going to condense them into one post. On 01/01/07, we met up with the Hales family. Heidi and her husband, Que, and four of their children (they have two others who are grown) are here to adopt their new son, Yue. The reason Heidi and I wanted so much to meet up is that one of Heidi’s current four, Nicholas, is a deaf child she adopted from China years ago (he’s 10 now), and he was very excited to hear that someone else was adopting an older deaf child and wanted to meet Charlie. Heidi’s whole family signs, so we figured it would be easy to meet up. We were even staying at the same hotel. So we gave them a ring once we heard they’d checked in, and Heidi came up to our room to chat for a while. She is a certified sign language interpreter, so it was fascinating for Charlie to see a whole conversation going on in ASL between us.
We all went shopping after her kids woke up from a nap. One of the coolest things we ran across was an art called finger-painting. The artist has a bowl of black ink that he dips his palm or fingernails in and then paints pictures. He was making the most amazing pictures of rocks, waterfalls, and trees. The lady standing next to him, who spoke good English, was extolling his virtues, but explained that he was the student, not the Master (so hard not to laugh recalling Jen’s description of the Master of the Crystal Balls in Nanjing). After looking through works done by the student versus the absent Master, we decided we liked the student’s style better, and we all bought a bunch of his stuff. He looked very pleased.
We were told the McDonald’s was just over the pedestrian bridge over the Pearl River and on the corner. (The area of Guangzhou where everyone stays during adoption work is called Shamian Island, and it’s separated from the rest of the city by a footbridge.) So we crossed over into the city, where nearly no one speaks English, and looked for a Mickey D’s on a corner. No can find. We started looking at 3 p.m. We finally found it at 5 p.m. And boy, did we get some stares while we were wandering around. Heidi’s family consists of two Caucasian teen-agers, a Chinese child, and a Haitian child, and I’ve got a Chinese child, and the two Chinese children between us and most of the rest of us as well were signing. We were a crew like nothing this island has ever seen before.
Later that night, Heidi’s deaf son, Nicholas, came up and played remote control cars with Charlie. The hotel room wasn’t quite big enough for races, so we took them out in the hallway, and Heidi, Jen, Shannon (Heidi’s teen-age daughter) and I all sat in the hallway chatting while the boys crashed cars into the walls and doors. Thank God most all the rooms were empty! Heidi has some absolutely fascinating and horrific stories about her former adoptions, and I have an enormous amount of respect for this woman. When she realizes that a child is meant to be with her, she is tenacious in bringing that child home and I don’t think anything can stand in her way for long. These stories belong in a book, and soon!
On the second day, we had some touring in GZ. We nixed another dead guy from the itinerary. We went to the Chen Family Temple, which was fabulous. Who should we happen to run into there? The whole Hales family! They had a separate guide. We agreed we should have coordinated this better and all shared one guide to save on some $. When we first arrived, our guide told us there were many executions going on there that day, so we wouldn’t be able to see everything. Well, gosh, if there were executions going on, I’m sure we wouldn’t WANT to see it all…it took a while to realize he meant excavations. There were a number of rooms that were closed to the public because workers were excavating things from them and renovating woodwork, etc. Whew! That was a close call.
Our guide then took us to lunch at a local dimsen restaurant, and we were seated in a semi-private room. It had two large round tables in it. The other was empty. They started serving our meal, which had a lot of shrimp stuff (apparently that’s another local delicacy), so sherpa was doing her push-the-food-around-the-plate-and-act-like-I’m-really-eating act, when the Hales family walks in and sits down at the other table. Their food started coming, and although they had a lot of the same stuff we did, their dimsen did not contain shrimp, and they had some other dishes without crustaceans of any kind, so the next thing I know, my sherpa is begging for food. Well, not begging exactly—more like bargaining, offering some shrimp dishes in return for anything, anything at all, that looked like noodles or rice.
After lunch, we went to a beautiful building we had seen from the road and inquired about earlier in the day. It turned out to be a music hall that was erected as a monument to Dr. Sun-Yat Sen, the first president of China. It was a gorgeous building, and the gardens around it were lovely. Very conducive to letting lunch settle while on a leisurely stroll. Then Wen took us to Yuexiu Park, which was simply huge. We had a great time there, rented a paddle boat (bike boat, as the Chinese call them) for an hour and paddled around the lake. Charlie had immense fun at this.
On Jan 3, we had a free day with no plans, which was a good thing, because breakfast ended up being a long, drawn-out affair. We went into a hotel that promised in English on the outside marquee that it had good food in three styles. The problem, we found after we were seated, was that the menu was not in English, nor did any of the staff speak English. We were the only Caucasian faces in the joint, and I do believe we may have been their first American customers ever, despite the English on the outside.
Did I mention that sherpa and I are brave? Rather than trying to pantomime eggs and bacon and pancakes (ever tried THAT?), we actually gave the Chinese menu to Charlie and let him order. You do remember that in earlier posts, we caught Charlie eating things like dog meat and ostrich kidneys, right? I handed him the menu, told him to order, and told him severely, “NO DOG!” That sent him into gales of giggles. He ordered three dishes, and we held our breath and waited for the results.
The first dish to come out looked like cubes of fried potatoes. I took his dictionary and asked him if it was potato, and he shook his head no and started digging on the Chinese side of the dictionary to find the word. Couldn’t find it. I tentatively tried it—not bad, so I had some more. Jen even tried it, and didn’t gag on it. Then Charlie finally found the word. Radish. Jen carefully set her chopsticks aside.
The next dish out was congee. This, for the uninitiated, is rice that has been cooked in water until it turns to mush, with whatever the cook decides to throw in for flavor or color. The cook in this case had thrown in cilantro and meat. Charlie hastened to sign “cow.” Hey, I’m all over this one. It’s basically beef soup with rice.
Turns out sherpa hates cilantro. She did her little pushing-food-around-the-plate routine again.
The next dish out was noodles with baby squid. Ain’t no way sherpa is touching that. Strike three, Charlie.
Charlie and I left full, but I heard a large growl from sherpa’s stomach on the way out the door. Fortunately, the guide had shown me an internet café on the way past the day before, so I knew where to take her. We headed down to a place called Blenz, where I planned to caffeinate my sherpa well. What did we see when we walked in the door? Cheesecake! Honest-to-God cheesecake, not white cake with rubber icing. We were both drooling at the sight, and they had three different flavors, forcing us to choose. We almost ordered all three.
The rest of the day we just wandered around the island, shopping, getting laundry done, etc. Nothing majorly exciting.
The following day was the consulate appointment, which meant we had to sit in our hotel while our guide was at the consulate getting Charlie’s visa processed. Our room felt like a sauna, and we couldn’t get the heat down any, so we were getting crabby by the time our guide was supposed to call. Eleven-thirty came and went, no guide. He finally rang the doorbell, looking harried. Apparently one form he had filled out still needed a signature (he had originally told me that section didn’t apply to me due to the category visa my son was getting, but it did), and he had to re-do the form and get it back to the consulate, which was 45 minutes away, within an hour. He said we could leave at that point, but me being the paranoid person I am, I made him promise to call us once all was clear, and THEN we would go. So we had another hour of sitting in the sauna before we heard word back that everything was good to go.
It was so nice outside that day. We didn’t even need sweaters. We went out to Friendship Park with a hackey-sack (those things are harder to use than I ever believed) and Charlie’s remote-control cars. We raced cars for a while, and even got a couple of the local kids interested. Then Charlie wanted to play at a little bit of karate, so I showed him a couple of stances and how to punch. Then I realized that a couple of guys were staring at us from the sidelines. Here’s a crazy western woman showing this kid karate moves and waving her hands about like crazy. They just kept on staring and staring. That’s when my sherpa found a secret weapon. She trained the video camera on them very conspicuously. I don’t know if it was even running or not, but it made them nervous. They immediately started smiling and waving and backing up. Eventually they backed their way out of sight.
Charlie is really starting to blossom. There are times when communications are tough, so we have our misunderstandings, but most of the time he seems to understand things pretty well, and he is starting to give me back more signs now and not just take them in. Not what I'd call full-blown conversations, but if I tell a funny story or I'm interpreting something funny that Jen has just said, he laughs at the appropriate time or asks just enough of a question that I know he got the basic gist of it. He is mostly happy, but on occasion introspective, which is totally to be expected, since he's been transplanted from everything and everyone familiar to him. I find it amazing that he's as good-natured and happy as he is, really. But I see him opening up a little more each day. He's a very sweet child, and it's easy to see why he's everybody's favorite.
The following day was oath day, when we go to the consulate, take an oath, and get the child’s visa. We checked out of the hotel, and since we were supposed to meet the paperwork guide at the consulate at 3:30 for our 4:00 appointment, we had time for a trip to the zoo, which our touring guide kept referring to as the ZOOM.
This ZOOM was one of the saddest places I have been in my life, and keep in mind, I’ve been to my son’s orphanage. We saw a monkey who had such a bad case of mange that he couldn’t decide where to scratch next, trying to scratch everywhere at once. The tiger was in a cage that only gave him enough space to pace for four strides before turning around. One of the lions was so near death that he had no fur left and you could see every vein popping up through his thin skin, just a bag of bones. Their national treasure, the panda, looked dirty and unkempt instead of white and fat and happy. He had a huge cage, but it was all concrete. It was just a sad, depressing little place, and I was happy to leave it.
Wen got us to the consulate where we were to meet the paperwork guide. (Wen was not licensed to enter the consulate and process adoption paperwork.) However, our paperwork guide was not there. We can’t get in, because the guide has to procure an entry appointment ticket. When it became obvious that our guide wasn’t going to show up, Wen had a stroke of genius. Another adoption group from another hotel was about to come through, and their guide had a group entry ticket. Wen suggested we just tag onto their group to get in and go from there.
Sure enough, we snuck into the consulate with this other group. Got through security and another family who had been through this before gave us advice on what lines to get in, what to do, what to say, what to look for. We took our oath, and this family “lent” us their guide to check over the visa and make sure everything was in order. Then we were outta there and on our way to the airport.
Sherpa could tell I wasn’t capable of coherent speech right then, and she had Wen try to get this other guide on the phone for us. When she got him, all he would say was that he was stuck in traffic.
My initial inclination was to contact WACAP and tell them what a disaster every contact we’ve had with this agency has been (first dragon lady making fun of my son’s signing, and now this no-show guide) and insist that they try to get back the $600 I had paid for this agency to process my paperwork. But I needed to calm down first, so I set the issue aside for a few days so I could settle a bit.
Later, in Beijing, by the time I was actually ready to write, I found out what really happened. I had sent a note to Heidi, telling her about this and to watch out if she got this guide when she returned to Guangzhou with her new son, and it turned out he was assigned to her. She discussed the situation with him to make sure the same would not happen to them, and he admitted to her that his mother had died that morning, and he had been stuck in traffic trying to get back to the consulate. Why didn’t he call me and tell me there was a problem and he would need to send a replacement? Because he was afraid for his job—in China, you do your job, it is your duty. There is no replacement to send, no one to cover your responsibilities. Even as much as parents are revered, apparently their deaths still do not interfere with your duties. He felt shamed because he had failed us, and he had tears welling up when he talked to Heidi about it.
I’m certainly not going to add to that man’s troubles at this point. I feel like a heel for being steamed up over him not showing up. It’s so sad that he felt like he had to try to rush to get there even at a time when he needed to be with his family, and failing to make it to that appointment just added one more thing to go wrong on what had to be the worst day of his life. I sent him my condolences through Heidi and prayed that God would give me a little more patience in the future when it feels like there must be more to the story.
The important thing was that we got the visa (since I didn’t have my guide with my paperwork, I won’t know if everything is perfectly in order until I get to Los Angeles) and we got to the airport on time for our flight to Beijing.
The flight was delayed, not sure over what, so we all had plenty of time to sit around the airport and eat potato chips. I couldn’t wait to get to Beijing, because I knew Rick was waiting there for us.
Charlie had some trouble on this flight, too. He did okay with the take-off, but we hit some more serious turbulence on this flight—my stomach even dropped a little—and it really unnerved him. And he felt sick the whole time we were descending for the landing. He spent the whole 20 minutes or so before landing with his head forward in his lap cradled in his hands. We had taught him on the last flight how to clear his ears when they hurt, but this seemed to be either a headache or some upset. He was better once we got on the ground.
Our guide met us once we got out of baggage claim. His name was Tony, and his English was fantastic. He informed me that Rick had landed okay and was at the hotel waiting for us, so we headed for the hotel. More on Beijing in the next post.
We all went shopping after her kids woke up from a nap. One of the coolest things we ran across was an art called finger-painting. The artist has a bowl of black ink that he dips his palm or fingernails in and then paints pictures. He was making the most amazing pictures of rocks, waterfalls, and trees. The lady standing next to him, who spoke good English, was extolling his virtues, but explained that he was the student, not the Master (so hard not to laugh recalling Jen’s description of the Master of the Crystal Balls in Nanjing). After looking through works done by the student versus the absent Master, we decided we liked the student’s style better, and we all bought a bunch of his stuff. He looked very pleased.
We were told the McDonald’s was just over the pedestrian bridge over the Pearl River and on the corner. (The area of Guangzhou where everyone stays during adoption work is called Shamian Island, and it’s separated from the rest of the city by a footbridge.) So we crossed over into the city, where nearly no one speaks English, and looked for a Mickey D’s on a corner. No can find. We started looking at 3 p.m. We finally found it at 5 p.m. And boy, did we get some stares while we were wandering around. Heidi’s family consists of two Caucasian teen-agers, a Chinese child, and a Haitian child, and I’ve got a Chinese child, and the two Chinese children between us and most of the rest of us as well were signing. We were a crew like nothing this island has ever seen before.
Later that night, Heidi’s deaf son, Nicholas, came up and played remote control cars with Charlie. The hotel room wasn’t quite big enough for races, so we took them out in the hallway, and Heidi, Jen, Shannon (Heidi’s teen-age daughter) and I all sat in the hallway chatting while the boys crashed cars into the walls and doors. Thank God most all the rooms were empty! Heidi has some absolutely fascinating and horrific stories about her former adoptions, and I have an enormous amount of respect for this woman. When she realizes that a child is meant to be with her, she is tenacious in bringing that child home and I don’t think anything can stand in her way for long. These stories belong in a book, and soon!
On the second day, we had some touring in GZ. We nixed another dead guy from the itinerary. We went to the Chen Family Temple, which was fabulous. Who should we happen to run into there? The whole Hales family! They had a separate guide. We agreed we should have coordinated this better and all shared one guide to save on some $. When we first arrived, our guide told us there were many executions going on there that day, so we wouldn’t be able to see everything. Well, gosh, if there were executions going on, I’m sure we wouldn’t WANT to see it all…it took a while to realize he meant excavations. There were a number of rooms that were closed to the public because workers were excavating things from them and renovating woodwork, etc. Whew! That was a close call.
Our guide then took us to lunch at a local dimsen restaurant, and we were seated in a semi-private room. It had two large round tables in it. The other was empty. They started serving our meal, which had a lot of shrimp stuff (apparently that’s another local delicacy), so sherpa was doing her push-the-food-around-the-plate-and-act-like-I’m-really-eating act, when the Hales family walks in and sits down at the other table. Their food started coming, and although they had a lot of the same stuff we did, their dimsen did not contain shrimp, and they had some other dishes without crustaceans of any kind, so the next thing I know, my sherpa is begging for food. Well, not begging exactly—more like bargaining, offering some shrimp dishes in return for anything, anything at all, that looked like noodles or rice.
After lunch, we went to a beautiful building we had seen from the road and inquired about earlier in the day. It turned out to be a music hall that was erected as a monument to Dr. Sun-Yat Sen, the first president of China. It was a gorgeous building, and the gardens around it were lovely. Very conducive to letting lunch settle while on a leisurely stroll. Then Wen took us to Yuexiu Park, which was simply huge. We had a great time there, rented a paddle boat (bike boat, as the Chinese call them) for an hour and paddled around the lake. Charlie had immense fun at this.
On Jan 3, we had a free day with no plans, which was a good thing, because breakfast ended up being a long, drawn-out affair. We went into a hotel that promised in English on the outside marquee that it had good food in three styles. The problem, we found after we were seated, was that the menu was not in English, nor did any of the staff speak English. We were the only Caucasian faces in the joint, and I do believe we may have been their first American customers ever, despite the English on the outside.
Did I mention that sherpa and I are brave? Rather than trying to pantomime eggs and bacon and pancakes (ever tried THAT?), we actually gave the Chinese menu to Charlie and let him order. You do remember that in earlier posts, we caught Charlie eating things like dog meat and ostrich kidneys, right? I handed him the menu, told him to order, and told him severely, “NO DOG!” That sent him into gales of giggles. He ordered three dishes, and we held our breath and waited for the results.
The first dish to come out looked like cubes of fried potatoes. I took his dictionary and asked him if it was potato, and he shook his head no and started digging on the Chinese side of the dictionary to find the word. Couldn’t find it. I tentatively tried it—not bad, so I had some more. Jen even tried it, and didn’t gag on it. Then Charlie finally found the word. Radish. Jen carefully set her chopsticks aside.
The next dish out was congee. This, for the uninitiated, is rice that has been cooked in water until it turns to mush, with whatever the cook decides to throw in for flavor or color. The cook in this case had thrown in cilantro and meat. Charlie hastened to sign “cow.” Hey, I’m all over this one. It’s basically beef soup with rice.
Turns out sherpa hates cilantro. She did her little pushing-food-around-the-plate routine again.
The next dish out was noodles with baby squid. Ain’t no way sherpa is touching that. Strike three, Charlie.
Charlie and I left full, but I heard a large growl from sherpa’s stomach on the way out the door. Fortunately, the guide had shown me an internet café on the way past the day before, so I knew where to take her. We headed down to a place called Blenz, where I planned to caffeinate my sherpa well. What did we see when we walked in the door? Cheesecake! Honest-to-God cheesecake, not white cake with rubber icing. We were both drooling at the sight, and they had three different flavors, forcing us to choose. We almost ordered all three.
The rest of the day we just wandered around the island, shopping, getting laundry done, etc. Nothing majorly exciting.
The following day was the consulate appointment, which meant we had to sit in our hotel while our guide was at the consulate getting Charlie’s visa processed. Our room felt like a sauna, and we couldn’t get the heat down any, so we were getting crabby by the time our guide was supposed to call. Eleven-thirty came and went, no guide. He finally rang the doorbell, looking harried. Apparently one form he had filled out still needed a signature (he had originally told me that section didn’t apply to me due to the category visa my son was getting, but it did), and he had to re-do the form and get it back to the consulate, which was 45 minutes away, within an hour. He said we could leave at that point, but me being the paranoid person I am, I made him promise to call us once all was clear, and THEN we would go. So we had another hour of sitting in the sauna before we heard word back that everything was good to go.
It was so nice outside that day. We didn’t even need sweaters. We went out to Friendship Park with a hackey-sack (those things are harder to use than I ever believed) and Charlie’s remote-control cars. We raced cars for a while, and even got a couple of the local kids interested. Then Charlie wanted to play at a little bit of karate, so I showed him a couple of stances and how to punch. Then I realized that a couple of guys were staring at us from the sidelines. Here’s a crazy western woman showing this kid karate moves and waving her hands about like crazy. They just kept on staring and staring. That’s when my sherpa found a secret weapon. She trained the video camera on them very conspicuously. I don’t know if it was even running or not, but it made them nervous. They immediately started smiling and waving and backing up. Eventually they backed their way out of sight.
Charlie is really starting to blossom. There are times when communications are tough, so we have our misunderstandings, but most of the time he seems to understand things pretty well, and he is starting to give me back more signs now and not just take them in. Not what I'd call full-blown conversations, but if I tell a funny story or I'm interpreting something funny that Jen has just said, he laughs at the appropriate time or asks just enough of a question that I know he got the basic gist of it. He is mostly happy, but on occasion introspective, which is totally to be expected, since he's been transplanted from everything and everyone familiar to him. I find it amazing that he's as good-natured and happy as he is, really. But I see him opening up a little more each day. He's a very sweet child, and it's easy to see why he's everybody's favorite.
The following day was oath day, when we go to the consulate, take an oath, and get the child’s visa. We checked out of the hotel, and since we were supposed to meet the paperwork guide at the consulate at 3:30 for our 4:00 appointment, we had time for a trip to the zoo, which our touring guide kept referring to as the ZOOM.
This ZOOM was one of the saddest places I have been in my life, and keep in mind, I’ve been to my son’s orphanage. We saw a monkey who had such a bad case of mange that he couldn’t decide where to scratch next, trying to scratch everywhere at once. The tiger was in a cage that only gave him enough space to pace for four strides before turning around. One of the lions was so near death that he had no fur left and you could see every vein popping up through his thin skin, just a bag of bones. Their national treasure, the panda, looked dirty and unkempt instead of white and fat and happy. He had a huge cage, but it was all concrete. It was just a sad, depressing little place, and I was happy to leave it.
Wen got us to the consulate where we were to meet the paperwork guide. (Wen was not licensed to enter the consulate and process adoption paperwork.) However, our paperwork guide was not there. We can’t get in, because the guide has to procure an entry appointment ticket. When it became obvious that our guide wasn’t going to show up, Wen had a stroke of genius. Another adoption group from another hotel was about to come through, and their guide had a group entry ticket. Wen suggested we just tag onto their group to get in and go from there.
Sure enough, we snuck into the consulate with this other group. Got through security and another family who had been through this before gave us advice on what lines to get in, what to do, what to say, what to look for. We took our oath, and this family “lent” us their guide to check over the visa and make sure everything was in order. Then we were outta there and on our way to the airport.
Sherpa could tell I wasn’t capable of coherent speech right then, and she had Wen try to get this other guide on the phone for us. When she got him, all he would say was that he was stuck in traffic.
My initial inclination was to contact WACAP and tell them what a disaster every contact we’ve had with this agency has been (first dragon lady making fun of my son’s signing, and now this no-show guide) and insist that they try to get back the $600 I had paid for this agency to process my paperwork. But I needed to calm down first, so I set the issue aside for a few days so I could settle a bit.
Later, in Beijing, by the time I was actually ready to write, I found out what really happened. I had sent a note to Heidi, telling her about this and to watch out if she got this guide when she returned to Guangzhou with her new son, and it turned out he was assigned to her. She discussed the situation with him to make sure the same would not happen to them, and he admitted to her that his mother had died that morning, and he had been stuck in traffic trying to get back to the consulate. Why didn’t he call me and tell me there was a problem and he would need to send a replacement? Because he was afraid for his job—in China, you do your job, it is your duty. There is no replacement to send, no one to cover your responsibilities. Even as much as parents are revered, apparently their deaths still do not interfere with your duties. He felt shamed because he had failed us, and he had tears welling up when he talked to Heidi about it.
I’m certainly not going to add to that man’s troubles at this point. I feel like a heel for being steamed up over him not showing up. It’s so sad that he felt like he had to try to rush to get there even at a time when he needed to be with his family, and failing to make it to that appointment just added one more thing to go wrong on what had to be the worst day of his life. I sent him my condolences through Heidi and prayed that God would give me a little more patience in the future when it feels like there must be more to the story.
The important thing was that we got the visa (since I didn’t have my guide with my paperwork, I won’t know if everything is perfectly in order until I get to Los Angeles) and we got to the airport on time for our flight to Beijing.
The flight was delayed, not sure over what, so we all had plenty of time to sit around the airport and eat potato chips. I couldn’t wait to get to Beijing, because I knew Rick was waiting there for us.
Charlie had some trouble on this flight, too. He did okay with the take-off, but we hit some more serious turbulence on this flight—my stomach even dropped a little—and it really unnerved him. And he felt sick the whole time we were descending for the landing. He spent the whole 20 minutes or so before landing with his head forward in his lap cradled in his hands. We had taught him on the last flight how to clear his ears when they hurt, but this seemed to be either a headache or some upset. He was better once we got on the ground.
Our guide met us once we got out of baggage claim. His name was Tony, and his English was fantastic. He informed me that Rick had landed okay and was at the hotel waiting for us, so we headed for the hotel. More on Beijing in the next post.
Sunday, December 31, 2006
What Happens When Sherpas Don't Double-Check
Today we got up early for our flight to Guangzhou, in southern China. We had to leave the hotel at 6 a.m. to get to the airport on time, so our wake-up call was at 4:30 a.m. Charlie was not happy about being aroused from a deep sleep at such an ungodly hour, but he complied with my request to get dressed and pack up the last-minute stuff.
We had wrapped up gifts for Lily and our driver. I had managed to get a bunch of multi-purpose tools at a good price while in the U.S. You know—the things that had a wrench, three different screwdrivers, a knife, and a hammer all in one. These were nice, heavy ones, and I can feel my suitcase getting lighter every time I give one away. I started out with six. Two went to officials at Civil Affairs in Nanjing, one went to the teacher who accompanied Ms. Tang to bring Charlie to meet us, and now one to the driver. That left two of them sitting out, so I stuffed the remaining ones into a bag and handed over the wrapped one to the driver, who was supremely pleased at having been included in the gift-giving spree.
No time for breakfast today, nothing open this early. But we figured we’d have ½ hour to kill once we got to the airport and could grab some over-priced something-or-other once we got checked in and to our gate.
We got in line at the airline counter. As we were the next person up, Lily muttered that we had to get in line, she was just informed that the luggage machine in this line had stopped working.
Same thing in the next line. I think they were just funnin’ with us. I could feel our ½ hour margin shrinking.
Then we got in a line where the machine actually worked. Our paperwork was all in order, the suitcases took off on the conveyor belt, and we were ready to take our carry-ons and go through security.
Jen and Charlie made it through with no problem, but they asked me to open my carry-on bag. Sure, no problem. Opened it up, here help yourself.
The guy knew exactly where to reach—he was on a mission, ‘cause he had seen something he didn’t like on the x-ray. I must have looked like a ghost when he pulled out one of those tools and opened it up to show me the knife and shook his head no-no. Fortunately, this was not the United States. I think if I had done something that stupid going through American security, I’d have been handcuffed and hauled off for questioning. As it was, he merely said the words “check baggage” and handed me the tool. I reached for my carry-on, and he pulled it away from me, indicating that Jen could watch it until I returned from taking that to have added to my checked baggage. I finally managed to convince him that I needed to get in that bag, there were TWO of these things in there, and he had only found one. He looked a little sheepish at that, but let me get the second one, and sent me back to the counter.
Thank God that Lily, our perfect guide, never leaves the terminal until her guests are through security and she can’t see them any more. She was watching all this from a distance, knew something was wrong but couldn’t see quite what, until I got close enough. So she went back to the counter with me and helped me get them to bring one of my bags back. Fortunately mine were easy for the worker trying to find them to identify, since I had a bright yellow bungee cord around one suitcase and a bright green one around another. They brought one of them out (took them about 15 minutes, since they were already en route to the plane), let me stuff the tools in it, and then sent it back again.
I was finally allowed to go through security and rejoin Jen and Charlie. Sherpa was stewing because she felt she should have double-checked the packing. How did I end up with a sherpa with such a guilt complex??? We started the mile-long trek to our gate, and finally got there with 5 minutes to spare before boarding call. Not enough time to order any over-priced food.
They did serve a meal on the plane, which surprised us, since it was only a 2-hour flight, but none of it was to Charlie’s liking. I think he just wasn’t feeling very good. He was hot, and once we were up to altitude and the seat belt sign came off, I got him to ball up his coat and place it on my lap as a pillow. We removed the armrest between us and he leaned over and fell asleep in my lap for part of the flight.
He was a little alarmed when we hit some turbulence and looked at me to see if he
should start panicking, but from my calm “wow, isn’t this fun?” expression, he decided it wasn’t worth getting excited over.
I had explained to him before the flight started how the flaps on the wings worked when the pilot wanted to slow down the plane. He kept watching out the window periodically to see when the flaps would go up. He seemed to enjoy the landing, watching all the pieces. Jen keeps talking about what a genius Charlie is (doesn’t seem to be anything the boy can’t figure out), and she fully expected him to go fly the plane for the next flight now that he had it all down pat.
You should have seen his face, though, after we landed and were taxiing to the terminal. Remember in yesterday’s entry I mentioned that I wasn’t sure he understood exactly where we were going, just that he was getting his medical exam there and had to go on an airplane? Well, what I didn’t realize was that he thought we had just landed in America. You should have seen the confused look on his face when he read the Chinese characters for the city painted in big red letters on one of the hangars. Then he signed, “Chinese writing in America?” Oh, Lord, I just lost it. So I fished out a flight magazine from the seat in front of me, and fortunately it had a map of the whole of China in it, which I hadn’t had in the hotel room when I was trying to explain this whole scenario. I showed him where we had just spent 5 days, and where we had just flown to and repeated the highlights of why we were here, then where we were going next after this (Beijing) and some of the things we would do there, and then flew my hand off the page in the direction we’d be flying to go to America and signed “America there.” Ah, okay. Now he gets it. That explains the Chinese writing. This just wasn’t what he’d been expecting.
There was a guide to meet us and take us to the hotel (only one this time, thanks to Lily—the other agency had tried to mess this one up, too, but she caught it by coordinating with Dragon Lady and telling her to call them off). Our new guide was named Wen (pronounced more like Wun). Very nice man, but his English was very hard to understand. He didn’t quite seem to get the deal with Charlie, because he kept speaking to him. I explained that Charlie was deaf, and Wen would nod like he understood, but then talk to him some more. Okay, maybe he doesn’t understand the word deaf, not in his vocabulary. So I told him that Charlie could not hear him. He nodded sagely. He saw us signing. He asked him more questions.
Some people just don’t get it.
I let that one roll off.
We were taken to our room, but there had been a misunderstanding. The room had only 2beds and no space for a rollaway. We called and asked what was going on with the third bed, and they sent up a roll-away bed that was so small Charlie’s feet would hang off the end. And in order to set that up, they had to remove the chair for the tiny little desk. And in order to get out of bed, Charlie would have had to crawl over my bed, because there was no space to get feet on the floor—the rollaway was sandwiched in between one bed and the wall. I went down and explained that there had been a mistake somewhere, they had us in the wrong sized room, we were supposed to have one of the Executive rooms. The guy at the desk tried to tell me that all the rooms at the hotel were the same size. I’m not buying that. I called Wen back and told him we had a problem that needed working out. He merely functioned as an interpreter between me and the hotel guy, parroting that the rooms were all the same size. He obviously was not going to raise enough of a fuss to get this worked out satisfactorily.
I miss Lily.
So I told him, in front of the hotel guy, “Okay, get us a different hotel. Now.”
That seemed to work. In order to do that, he had to call Jenny in Beijing, who handles all of OCDF’s reservations. Jenny got on the phone with me and I told her if the rooms were all the same size, we wanted to be in a different hotel. She told me to leave our luggage in the small room, go on to our medical appointment, and let her deal with this. So we dug out our paperwork and were about to head off to the medical appointment with Raymond, the guide handling our paperwork in this city, when they said they had a room they would like us to see and approve before leaving and before having the luggage transferred to it.
It was beautiful. And oddly enough, it wasn’t the same size. Imagine that! It had three twin beds. And they were soft western-style beds, not plywood boxes with pads. If we hadn’t had an appointment to get to, we’d have just sunk down and taken naps on the spot.
They gave us the room keys, and we took off running for the medical appointment. It went pretty smoothly. Charlie had to have 3 shots, but he barely even grimaced. He admitted later that evening that his arms were pretty sore, though. The doctor doing his physical was impressed that he had been taught to read and write Chinese. He was asking him questions by writing them down, and the only one that befuddled Charlie was the one about whether he had been an inpatient before. He underlined the characters for inpatient and gave the doc a quizzical look. Doc looked at me as if to say “what now?” so I explained in sign language to Charlie that the doctor needed to know if he had ever gone to the hospital and stayed there overnight for any sort of surgery (and I made sure to make the sign for surgery at the abdomen, because I knew that Charlie had had an appendectomy last summer). That he understood, and he wrote out to the doctor that he had an operation on his stomach last June.
I’m loving this. My new son of only 6 days is understanding and communicating better with me in sign language than with this Chinese doctor in his native language.
Deafies: 1, Hearies: 0.
Sherpa took off during the medical appointment and went to get water so we could at least quench our thirst when we got back to the room.
When we got back to the hotel, I felt like a total fool. There was no slot in the door for the room key to be inserted. I had shown Charlie at the hotel in Nanjing how to put the card in the door slot in the direction of the arrow and then wait for the green light, but here there was no slot. Yet I still have this plastic little card that needs to go somewhere, right?
As I’m standing there staring rather stupidly at the door, Charlie grabs the key card out of my hand, holds it up to a sensor on the door handle, and I hear this little “do-do-do-doooo do-doooo” tune that you hear right before the word “Charge!” and a green light flashes.
How did he know that? The boy grew up in an orphanage. He’s never been exposed to hotels and stuff like this before! How did he know that???? And why am I too dumb to have figured it out?
His grin at having figured it out for me just split his face in two.
Raymond came back to our room and we spent the next couple of hours doing paperwork for our consulate appointment on the 4th. Turns out we don’t actually go to that appointment, we stay in the hotel room while Raymond goes and submits the paperwork and the fees, and if all goes well, he’ll call us and let us know we’re free the rest of the day.
Finally, we got to leave for dinner. We were famished, having had only an airplane breakfast and no lunch, so we hit the streets looking for dinner. We passed by a place called Cow Bridge that Jen had heard great things about, so we went in. It was busy and noisy, but the menu looked….ummm….interesting. The prices were good. We found some great looking and great sounding dishes for us. Charlie, however, was another story. He liked the looks of everything on the menu, and the dish he chose was ostrich kidney in green beans. Ostrich kidney? Well, we already know he eats dog, so how bad can it be? Charlie definitely has an adventurous palate. I hope he doesn’t expect to be fed like this at home!
He enjoyed his ostrich kidneys. We enjoyed our dishes, too. I had a chicken curry that was very spicy hot (loved it!) and Jen had a mildly spicy beef dish that was really good, too. So we all left feeling fat and happy. And we go to sleep on soft beds that night!
The internet here is no better than in Nanjing. We were hoping things would be back up by now, but Lily had informed us before we left Nanjing that she had heard a report on the news that it wouldn’t be fixed until the 9th. It’s been taking about 5 minutes to load a single e-mail, and web sites take anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 minutes to load, if they bother to load at all before timing out. But Jen and I decided that we simply had to start up the blogs again before we forgot too much detail of these early days. So we have been writing our entries off-line in Word documents and then copying them into the blog as we can get them to load. Slow and painful, but at least we’re finally starting to get some word to the outside world. Don’t know if anyone’s really paying attention, but at least we’re getting it down.
So ended the first day in GZ. Charlie dealt amazingly well with his first plane flight and is now a seasoned traveler.
Happy New Year, everybody!
We had wrapped up gifts for Lily and our driver. I had managed to get a bunch of multi-purpose tools at a good price while in the U.S. You know—the things that had a wrench, three different screwdrivers, a knife, and a hammer all in one. These were nice, heavy ones, and I can feel my suitcase getting lighter every time I give one away. I started out with six. Two went to officials at Civil Affairs in Nanjing, one went to the teacher who accompanied Ms. Tang to bring Charlie to meet us, and now one to the driver. That left two of them sitting out, so I stuffed the remaining ones into a bag and handed over the wrapped one to the driver, who was supremely pleased at having been included in the gift-giving spree.
No time for breakfast today, nothing open this early. But we figured we’d have ½ hour to kill once we got to the airport and could grab some over-priced something-or-other once we got checked in and to our gate.
We got in line at the airline counter. As we were the next person up, Lily muttered that we had to get in line, she was just informed that the luggage machine in this line had stopped working.
Same thing in the next line. I think they were just funnin’ with us. I could feel our ½ hour margin shrinking.
Then we got in a line where the machine actually worked. Our paperwork was all in order, the suitcases took off on the conveyor belt, and we were ready to take our carry-ons and go through security.
Jen and Charlie made it through with no problem, but they asked me to open my carry-on bag. Sure, no problem. Opened it up, here help yourself.
The guy knew exactly where to reach—he was on a mission, ‘cause he had seen something he didn’t like on the x-ray. I must have looked like a ghost when he pulled out one of those tools and opened it up to show me the knife and shook his head no-no. Fortunately, this was not the United States. I think if I had done something that stupid going through American security, I’d have been handcuffed and hauled off for questioning. As it was, he merely said the words “check baggage” and handed me the tool. I reached for my carry-on, and he pulled it away from me, indicating that Jen could watch it until I returned from taking that to have added to my checked baggage. I finally managed to convince him that I needed to get in that bag, there were TWO of these things in there, and he had only found one. He looked a little sheepish at that, but let me get the second one, and sent me back to the counter.
Thank God that Lily, our perfect guide, never leaves the terminal until her guests are through security and she can’t see them any more. She was watching all this from a distance, knew something was wrong but couldn’t see quite what, until I got close enough. So she went back to the counter with me and helped me get them to bring one of my bags back. Fortunately mine were easy for the worker trying to find them to identify, since I had a bright yellow bungee cord around one suitcase and a bright green one around another. They brought one of them out (took them about 15 minutes, since they were already en route to the plane), let me stuff the tools in it, and then sent it back again.
I was finally allowed to go through security and rejoin Jen and Charlie. Sherpa was stewing because she felt she should have double-checked the packing. How did I end up with a sherpa with such a guilt complex??? We started the mile-long trek to our gate, and finally got there with 5 minutes to spare before boarding call. Not enough time to order any over-priced food.
They did serve a meal on the plane, which surprised us, since it was only a 2-hour flight, but none of it was to Charlie’s liking. I think he just wasn’t feeling very good. He was hot, and once we were up to altitude and the seat belt sign came off, I got him to ball up his coat and place it on my lap as a pillow. We removed the armrest between us and he leaned over and fell asleep in my lap for part of the flight.
He was a little alarmed when we hit some turbulence and looked at me to see if he
should start panicking, but from my calm “wow, isn’t this fun?” expression, he decided it wasn’t worth getting excited over.
I had explained to him before the flight started how the flaps on the wings worked when the pilot wanted to slow down the plane. He kept watching out the window periodically to see when the flaps would go up. He seemed to enjoy the landing, watching all the pieces. Jen keeps talking about what a genius Charlie is (doesn’t seem to be anything the boy can’t figure out), and she fully expected him to go fly the plane for the next flight now that he had it all down pat.
You should have seen his face, though, after we landed and were taxiing to the terminal. Remember in yesterday’s entry I mentioned that I wasn’t sure he understood exactly where we were going, just that he was getting his medical exam there and had to go on an airplane? Well, what I didn’t realize was that he thought we had just landed in America. You should have seen the confused look on his face when he read the Chinese characters for the city painted in big red letters on one of the hangars. Then he signed, “Chinese writing in America?” Oh, Lord, I just lost it. So I fished out a flight magazine from the seat in front of me, and fortunately it had a map of the whole of China in it, which I hadn’t had in the hotel room when I was trying to explain this whole scenario. I showed him where we had just spent 5 days, and where we had just flown to and repeated the highlights of why we were here, then where we were going next after this (Beijing) and some of the things we would do there, and then flew my hand off the page in the direction we’d be flying to go to America and signed “America there.” Ah, okay. Now he gets it. That explains the Chinese writing. This just wasn’t what he’d been expecting.
There was a guide to meet us and take us to the hotel (only one this time, thanks to Lily—the other agency had tried to mess this one up, too, but she caught it by coordinating with Dragon Lady and telling her to call them off). Our new guide was named Wen (pronounced more like Wun). Very nice man, but his English was very hard to understand. He didn’t quite seem to get the deal with Charlie, because he kept speaking to him. I explained that Charlie was deaf, and Wen would nod like he understood, but then talk to him some more. Okay, maybe he doesn’t understand the word deaf, not in his vocabulary. So I told him that Charlie could not hear him. He nodded sagely. He saw us signing. He asked him more questions.
I let that one roll off.
We were taken to our room, but there had been a misunderstanding. The room had only 2beds and no space for a rollaway. We called and asked what was going on with the third bed, and they sent up a roll-away bed that was so small Charlie’s feet would hang off the end. And in order to set that up, they had to remove the chair for the tiny little desk. And in order to get out of bed, Charlie would have had to crawl over my bed, because there was no space to get feet on the floor—the rollaway was sandwiched in between one bed and the wall. I went down and explained that there had been a mistake somewhere, they had us in the wrong sized room, we were supposed to have one of the Executive rooms. The guy at the desk tried to tell me that all the rooms at the hotel were the same size. I’m not buying that. I called Wen back and told him we had a problem that needed working out. He merely functioned as an interpreter between me and the hotel guy, parroting that the rooms were all the same size. He obviously was not going to raise enough of a fuss to get this worked out satisfactorily.
I miss Lily.
So I told him, in front of the hotel guy, “Okay, get us a different hotel. Now.”
That seemed to work. In order to do that, he had to call Jenny in Beijing, who handles all of OCDF’s reservations. Jenny got on the phone with me and I told her if the rooms were all the same size, we wanted to be in a different hotel. She told me to leave our luggage in the small room, go on to our medical appointment, and let her deal with this. So we dug out our paperwork and were about to head off to the medical appointment with Raymond, the guide handling our paperwork in this city, when they said they had a room they would like us to see and approve before leaving and before having the luggage transferred to it.
It was beautiful. And oddly enough, it wasn’t the same size. Imagine that! It had three twin beds. And they were soft western-style beds, not plywood boxes with pads. If we hadn’t had an appointment to get to, we’d have just sunk down and taken naps on the spot.
They gave us the room keys, and we took off running for the medical appointment. It went pretty smoothly. Charlie had to have 3 shots, but he barely even grimaced. He admitted later that evening that his arms were pretty sore, though. The doctor doing his physical was impressed that he had been taught to read and write Chinese. He was asking him questions by writing them down, and the only one that befuddled Charlie was the one about whether he had been an inpatient before. He underlined the characters for inpatient and gave the doc a quizzical look. Doc looked at me as if to say “what now?” so I explained in sign language to Charlie that the doctor needed to know if he had ever gone to the hospital and stayed there overnight for any sort of surgery (and I made sure to make the sign for surgery at the abdomen, because I knew that Charlie had had an appendectomy last summer). That he understood, and he wrote out to the doctor that he had an operation on his stomach last June.
I’m loving this. My new son of only 6 days is understanding and communicating better with me in sign language than with this Chinese doctor in his native language.
Deafies: 1, Hearies: 0.
Sherpa took off during the medical appointment and went to get water so we could at least quench our thirst when we got back to the room.
When we got back to the hotel, I felt like a total fool. There was no slot in the door for the room key to be inserted. I had shown Charlie at the hotel in Nanjing how to put the card in the door slot in the direction of the arrow and then wait for the green light, but here there was no slot. Yet I still have this plastic little card that needs to go somewhere, right?
As I’m standing there staring rather stupidly at the door, Charlie grabs the key card out of my hand, holds it up to a sensor on the door handle, and I hear this little “do-do-do-doooo do-doooo” tune that you hear right before the word “Charge!” and a green light flashes.
How did he know that? The boy grew up in an orphanage. He’s never been exposed to hotels and stuff like this before! How did he know that???? And why am I too dumb to have figured it out?
His grin at having figured it out for me just split his face in two.
Raymond came back to our room and we spent the next couple of hours doing paperwork for our consulate appointment on the 4th. Turns out we don’t actually go to that appointment, we stay in the hotel room while Raymond goes and submits the paperwork and the fees, and if all goes well, he’ll call us and let us know we’re free the rest of the day.
Finally, we got to leave for dinner. We were famished, having had only an airplane breakfast and no lunch, so we hit the streets looking for dinner. We passed by a place called Cow Bridge that Jen had heard great things about, so we went in. It was busy and noisy, but the menu looked….ummm….interesting. The prices were good. We found some great looking and great sounding dishes for us. Charlie, however, was another story. He liked the looks of everything on the menu, and the dish he chose was ostrich kidney in green beans. Ostrich kidney? Well, we already know he eats dog, so how bad can it be? Charlie definitely has an adventurous palate. I hope he doesn’t expect to be fed like this at home!
He enjoyed his ostrich kidneys. We enjoyed our dishes, too. I had a chicken curry that was very spicy hot (loved it!) and Jen had a mildly spicy beef dish that was really good, too. So we all left feeling fat and happy. And we go to sleep on soft beds that night!
The internet here is no better than in Nanjing. We were hoping things would be back up by now, but Lily had informed us before we left Nanjing that she had heard a report on the news that it wouldn’t be fixed until the 9th. It’s been taking about 5 minutes to load a single e-mail, and web sites take anywhere from 5 minutes to 20 minutes to load, if they bother to load at all before timing out. But Jen and I decided that we simply had to start up the blogs again before we forgot too much detail of these early days. So we have been writing our entries off-line in Word documents and then copying them into the blog as we can get them to load. Slow and painful, but at least we’re finally starting to get some word to the outside world. Don’t know if anyone’s really paying attention, but at least we’re getting it down.
So ended the first day in GZ. Charlie dealt amazingly well with his first plane flight and is now a seasoned traveler.
Happy New Year, everybody!
Saturday, December 30, 2006
Visiting the Master
Today we toured Nanjing. We started off with the Children’s Science Museum. It was a neat place, and Charlie had an absolute blast. We were the only people in the place, which made it kind of eerie, but it also meant we had the guides (all of them) all to ourselves. Once they understood that the deaf kid could actually figure things out and understand what they were trying to explain through me, they were falling all over themselves to show him the exhibits. He especially loved getting in the fighter jet cockpit and “flying” the plane in one of those virtual 3D simulations. We got some great photos from there.
Then we went to the biggest park in Nanjing. Our experience there was written up so wonderfully by Jen on her blog that I’m just not even going to try to do it any differently. I’m citing hers. Following is “The Tale of The Master . . .”
As I promised in my earlier post, I have to tell the story that has
become one of our favorites - we laugh every time one of us mentions
it. It may turn out to be a "had to be there" but I'm hoping that I
can do it justice in the telling.
On our first day of touring Nanjing, we went to a wonderful park in
the city that was also along one portion of the city wall. We were
able to climb some stairs leading to the top of one portion, and as
always, there was a shop at the top. Lily, our fabulous guide in
Nanjing, explained that this shop was dedicated to glass painting.
It's really very cool, an artist paints a scene into a glass ball.
Doesn't sound too complicated, until you realize that the artist is
painting the ball through a hole the size of your index finger, and
upside down to boot. As we entered the shop, two of the girls rushed
over and breathlessly explained something to Lily in Chinese with all
possible urgency. One of them turned to K and myself and said in a
quavering voice, "today you are very lucky . . . today the MASTER is
here!" the other girl nods frantically and says "yes, yes Master
here!" Now, I hope you can understand how nearly impossible it was
not to burst out laughing at this point. I wasn't sure what to expect
as they ushered us with bowed heads to "The Master". Whatever I
expected, I wasn't disappointed.
At one side of the shop was a large, ornate worktable. Seated at this
table was the most serious Chinese man I've ever seen in my life.
Really, he looked almost severe. He was dressed all in black
traditional Chinese clothing. He barely deigned to look at us as he
sat so upright that I suspect he had a pole rammed into the back of
his shirt. His lips were a perfectly straight line. Too much fanfare,
you say? Just remember - he IS The Master, after all. At this time, I
still wasn't clear on what exactly he was the master of. Maybe China?
It turns out that he is the master of painting upside down into
little glass balls. He picked up a brush - the shop girls positively
quivered. One of them explained in a hushed voice, that this brush
was not a brush, but the tail of a mouse. I'm just relieved they
didn't ask me to eat it. With a jerk of his sleeve, the master began
to paint for us. We sensed we weren't supposed to speak. Every now
and then a shop girl would nudge us and say something to the effect
of "you see, the master".
I don't know if it was the actual artistry, or the reverence of the
shop girls, but I knew at once that I must have a little glass ball
that had been painted with a mouse's tail. We started browsing
through the store, shop girl at each elbow. They dutifully pointed
out which balls had been painted by students, and which by "The
Master". When it was a ball painted by The Master, they would do a
little Price Is Right flourish with their hands around the ball. The
prices were actually extremely reasonable, and there were two balls
that I couldn't choose between. I let Charlie choose for me, and he
was very pleased about that. He chose well. I am now the proud owner
of a glass ball on a wooden stand that has really beautiful trees
painted on it. Are you ready for this? The Master then decreed that
he would sign our balls, and he even painted Charlie's name (Xiao
Tian) on his in calligraphy. I think one of the shop girls fainted.
There you have the tale of The Master. Long may he live and paint.
I bought one of the pretty crystal balls, too. Mine is a four seasons ball, Chinese style. And
Charlie got a small one made by one of the apprentices that had a rooster in it. He was very excited about this, because he was born in the Year of the Rooster in the Chinese zodiac.
After the park, Lily took us to lunch at a local restaurant. Unfortunately, the girl who had taken the reservation from her had gone off duty and left no record of the reservation. We got to see Lily throw a fit with the restaurant staff until they finally prepared a private room for us. Not sure what she threatened them with, but whatever it was, it worked.
On the schedule for the afternoon was supposed to be a museum and a mausoleum. We went through the museum, and although I interpreted for Xiao Tian and he understood things okay, he was totally bored, and we couldn’t look at just the things we wanted to look at—the museum tour guide kept skipping over things we thought were interesting and spending long periods of time on things we had no interest in. We eventually met up with Lily again in the gift shop, where the shop girls were constantly hovering, telling us the virtues of everything we so much as glanced at, hoping to make a sale. Somehow, we weren’t tempted.
After seeing Xiao Tian’s lack of interest in the museum, though, we decided to nix the mausoleum. Frankly, we’d rather do fun stuff than visit dead guys. I know that sounds irreverent, but I have to consider the mix of people here. If I had friends with kids visiting me in Maryland, a crypt would definitely NOT be on the list of activities that I’d take them to see. So Lily canceled the mausoleum for us, and we went back to the hotel to rest up for the early flight the next day. We were even too tired to go out and hunt for food, so we ordered room service, complete with ice-cream sundaes for dessert. Did you know the Chinese serve cornflakes on ice-cream sundaes? It wasn’t bad, just different. The sherpa ordered American cheese cake, which actually didn't look at all like cheese cake we would recognize. It was more like white cake with rubber icing.
Then we packed our suitcases for the flight the next day. You'd think, having gotten rid of all the orphanage stuff, our suitcases would be much emptier and much lighter. What I hadn't taken into account, though, was that I had bought an entire wardrobe for Charlie. The suitcases bulged as badly as they had on the way in. This was not a good thing, because we can't just pick up another suitcase for any overflow, since in-country flights in China limit you to one checked bag and one carry-one per person. I was able to bring in two checked bags because it was an international flight, and fortunately we picked up Charlie on the first stop, so he became the "owner" of the second bag at that point. But we still needed to pick up our souvenirs in Guangzhou (where they would be less expensive than in Beijing) and would have one more in-country flight after that to get through. Ouch. Better make sure all our souvenirs are flat ones!
Before bed, as usual, we had a chat about what would be happening the next day. He was very excited about his first airplane flight and got very animated about that, so I wasn’t entirely sure he caught where we were going or why. But it was enough for now that he understood we were taking an airplane flight that was 2 hours long. We went through our little tuck-in routine and turned out the lights.
Then we went to the biggest park in Nanjing. Our experience there was written up so wonderfully by Jen on her blog that I’m just not even going to try to do it any differently. I’m citing hers. Following is “The Tale of The Master . . .”
As I promised in my earlier post, I have to tell the story that has
become one of our favorites - we laugh every time one of us mentions
it. It may turn out to be a "had to be there" but I'm hoping that I
can do it justice in the telling.
On our first day of touring Nanjing, we went to a wonderful park in
the city that was also along one portion of the city wall. We were
able to climb some stairs leading to the top of one portion, and as
always, there was a shop at the top. Lily, our fabulous guide in
Nanjing, explained that this shop was dedicated to glass painting.
It's really very cool, an artist paints a scene into a glass ball.
Doesn't sound too complicated, until you realize that the artist is
painting the ball through a hole the size of your index finger, and
upside down to boot. As we entered the shop, two of the girls rushed
over and breathlessly explained something to Lily in Chinese with all
possible urgency. One of them turned to K and myself and said in a
quavering voice, "today you are very lucky . . . today the MASTER is
here!" the other girl nods frantically and says "yes, yes Master
here!" Now, I hope you can understand how nearly impossible it was
not to burst out laughing at this point. I wasn't sure what to expect
as they ushered us with bowed heads to "The Master". Whatever I
expected, I wasn't disappointed.
At one side of the shop was a large, ornate worktable. Seated at this
table was the most serious Chinese man I've ever seen in my life.
Really, he looked almost severe. He was dressed all in black
traditional Chinese clothing. He barely deigned to look at us as he
sat so upright that I suspect he had a pole rammed into the back of
his shirt. His lips were a perfectly straight line. Too much fanfare,
you say? Just remember - he IS The Master, after all. At this time, I
still wasn't clear on what exactly he was the master of. Maybe China?
It turns out that he is the master of painting upside down into
little glass balls. He picked up a brush - the shop girls positively
quivered. One of them explained in a hushed voice, that this brush
was not a brush, but the tail of a mouse. I'm just relieved they
didn't ask me to eat it. With a jerk of his sleeve, the master began
to paint for us. We sensed we weren't supposed to speak. Every now
and then a shop girl would nudge us and say something to the effect
of "you see, the master".
I don't know if it was the actual artistry, or the reverence of the
shop girls, but I knew at once that I must have a little glass ball
that had been painted with a mouse's tail. We started browsing
through the store, shop girl at each elbow. They dutifully pointed
out which balls had been painted by students, and which by "The
Master". When it was a ball painted by The Master, they would do a
little Price Is Right flourish with their hands around the ball. The
prices were actually extremely reasonable, and there were two balls
that I couldn't choose between. I let Charlie choose for me, and he
was very pleased about that. He chose well. I am now the proud owner
of a glass ball on a wooden stand that has really beautiful trees
painted on it. Are you ready for this? The Master then decreed that
he would sign our balls, and he even painted Charlie's name (Xiao
Tian) on his in calligraphy. I think one of the shop girls fainted.
There you have the tale of The Master. Long may he live and paint.
I bought one of the pretty crystal balls, too. Mine is a four seasons ball, Chinese style. And
Charlie got a small one made by one of the apprentices that had a rooster in it. He was very excited about this, because he was born in the Year of the Rooster in the Chinese zodiac.
After the park, Lily took us to lunch at a local restaurant. Unfortunately, the girl who had taken the reservation from her had gone off duty and left no record of the reservation. We got to see Lily throw a fit with the restaurant staff until they finally prepared a private room for us. Not sure what she threatened them with, but whatever it was, it worked.
On the schedule for the afternoon was supposed to be a museum and a mausoleum. We went through the museum, and although I interpreted for Xiao Tian and he understood things okay, he was totally bored, and we couldn’t look at just the things we wanted to look at—the museum tour guide kept skipping over things we thought were interesting and spending long periods of time on things we had no interest in. We eventually met up with Lily again in the gift shop, where the shop girls were constantly hovering, telling us the virtues of everything we so much as glanced at, hoping to make a sale. Somehow, we weren’t tempted.
After seeing Xiao Tian’s lack of interest in the museum, though, we decided to nix the mausoleum. Frankly, we’d rather do fun stuff than visit dead guys. I know that sounds irreverent, but I have to consider the mix of people here. If I had friends with kids visiting me in Maryland, a crypt would definitely NOT be on the list of activities that I’d take them to see. So Lily canceled the mausoleum for us, and we went back to the hotel to rest up for the early flight the next day. We were even too tired to go out and hunt for food, so we ordered room service, complete with ice-cream sundaes for dessert. Did you know the Chinese serve cornflakes on ice-cream sundaes? It wasn’t bad, just different. The sherpa ordered American cheese cake, which actually didn't look at all like cheese cake we would recognize. It was more like white cake with rubber icing.
Then we packed our suitcases for the flight the next day. You'd think, having gotten rid of all the orphanage stuff, our suitcases would be much emptier and much lighter. What I hadn't taken into account, though, was that I had bought an entire wardrobe for Charlie. The suitcases bulged as badly as they had on the way in. This was not a good thing, because we can't just pick up another suitcase for any overflow, since in-country flights in China limit you to one checked bag and one carry-one per person. I was able to bring in two checked bags because it was an international flight, and fortunately we picked up Charlie on the first stop, so he became the "owner" of the second bag at that point. But we still needed to pick up our souvenirs in Guangzhou (where they would be less expensive than in Beijing) and would have one more in-country flight after that to get through. Ouch. Better make sure all our souvenirs are flat ones!
Before bed, as usual, we had a chat about what would be happening the next day. He was very excited about his first airplane flight and got very animated about that, so I wasn’t entirely sure he caught where we were going or why. But it was enough for now that he understood we were taking an airplane flight that was 2 hours long. We went through our little tuck-in routine and turned out the lights.
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